1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a system and method for entering text items, such as characters.
2. Description of Related Art
The rapid increase in the number and capacity of broadband Internet connections has lead to the introduction of new Internet-based services. One of these novel services is Internet Protocol Television (IPTV). The introduction of IPTV reduced the gap between TV and personal computers, since many features that were only available on a personal computer became accessible on a TV. The question is, however, how to make these new features easily accessible to users. Conventional remote controls fail to provide an easy and enjoyable interaction since they are not designed to support these new features, while on the other side a keyboard and mouse that can support these new features are not desired in the living room. One of the new features is the ability to search media content provided by service provider or search for particular program in a program guide. This search is often done by means of a text entry. As, the conventional remote control is not well suited for text entry, currently the most often used method for text entry is by using a screen keyboard operated by arrow keys.
Over the recent years, devices, in particular mobile phones have become available using predictive text entry methods. Such predictive text entry methods attempt to predict which letter mapped to a particular key of the keypad is most likely to be selected when the key is pressed during text entry. In this manner, the number of key taps required to enter non-numeric text is reduced compared to conventional multi-tap text entry.
Furthermore, hand-held communication devices have become available with small form factors or aesthetically pleasing shapes. In such hand-held communication devices, the provision of a conventional numeric keypad is often either impossible or undesirable. Consequently, the hand-held communication devices typically rely on menu driven displays and voice-recognition technologies such as voice-dialing and voice-entered commands in combination with a simple navigation key assembly instead of a full numeric keypad. However, in such devices, text messaging, if supported, requires extensive scrolling through a fixed character menu, and repeated keystrokes to select characters for a text message being composed.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,218,249 B2 discloses a hand-held communication device providing navigation key-based predictive text entry. It includes a display disposed for displaying characters selectable for entry in a character position of a text string being entered and a navigation key assembly for scrolling through and selecting from the characters displayed on the display. The characters displayed during text entry are arranged according to the probability of selection of each character for entry in the character position so that the character with the highest probability of selection is selected with a single input from the navigation key assembly.
However, with this device it will relatively often happen that the user does not wish to select the character with the highest probability but another character. It will then be necessary to scroll to this other character in order to enter it.